Offering a single, universal, definition of racism is a useful first step but not a destination, especially if it slams the door on understanding the diverse, fluid, and contested nature of the term. Discriminating against an ethno-racial community because of its imputed inherent and inherited characteristics is called racism in some places but not in others. And whilst I define all such discrimination as racism this does not mean that this is the only legitimate, or useful, word to use, still less that other labels should be displaced. In India, for example, ‘communalism’ and ‘casteism’ are often used to depict practices and ideologies that can overlap with what I am calling racism. In Peru ‘cholism’ is sometimes used to similar effect. The world is full of vocabularies of difference and discrimination. Rather than offering a template in which the word ‘racism’, verified by a Western canon of anti-racist scholarship, is stamped on diverse situations, it is necessary to listen and learn from different contexts.
What Law calls the ‘polycentric’ study of racism is a new field and it often exhibits the kind of definitional dilemmas that one might expect from an endeavour that is not only complex but nascent and politically charged.46 Berg and Wendt’s edited collection Racism in the Modern World can be taken as an example. The editors’ claim for the novelty and importance of the book is that it engages with multiple racializations around the world, and more specifically brings to bear ‘new global history’ approaches that challenge ‘Eurocentric interpretations of world history’.47 It is an impressive volume, yet a comparison of some of its chapters suggests the presence of definitional conflict. For example, Braude’s essay, ‘How Racism Arose in Europe and Why It Did Not in the Near East’, wraps itself in knots in order to argue that acts of ethnic violence in the ‘Near East’ have nothing to do with racism. Thus Braude notes that the treatment of Armenians in the ‘Near East’ in the first decades of the last century, during what he calls the Armenian ‘conflict’, ‘cannot be blamed on racism’. He arrives at this conclusion by defining racism in terms of biological ‘hereditarian determinism’ and finding this ideology to be unique to ‘modern Euro-American racism’.48 Yet in the next two chapters this definition and its geographical implications are overturned. First Geulen explains that racism and cultural prejudice can no longer be conceived as discrete traditions: ‘as early as the beginning of the twentieth century’ the idea of race had been ‘transformed and widened’, he tells us, ‘into something much broader than just physiology and bodily appearance’.49 In the following essay, ‘Racism and Genocide’, Barth uses what he calls the Armenian ‘genocide’ as a textbook example of how racist and cultural ideologies can combine to create the conditions for extermination.50 It is instructive that whilst Braude writes of an Armenian ‘conflict’, Barth writes of an Armenian ‘genocide’. It is a difference that reflects each scholar’s framing of racism.
There are still those who seek to root racism firmly and solely in the soil of biological determinism and race ideology. Thus for Banton, racism is ‘the doctrine that a man’s behaviour is determined by stable inherited characteristics deriving from separate racial stocks having distinctive attributes and usually considered to stand to one another in relations of superiority and inferiority’.51 Although this quote is from 1970, and its definition of racism has become rare, the inference that race ideology is the foundation stone, or ultimate type, of racism remains prevalent. Hence, it is necessary to be clear why Banton’s definition is not sustainable. Conceptually it relies on two things: first, the idea that race and ethnicity are clearly distinct and, second, the idea that ‘race ideology’ is a coherent and relatively static body of knowledge. Neither is plausible: the borders between race and ethnicity are inherently hazy and ‘race ideology’ has long been in doubt. Ideologies of race hierarchy, and/or White supremacy, have always been surrounded by critics and contradictions. When Jean Finot, in Le Préjugé des races, published in 1905 (translated into English in 1906), lambasted the ‘falsely conceived science of races’ and described races as ‘outside all reality’ and ‘fictions in our brains’, he was building on a rich tradition of race-scepticism.52 The transition from the narrative of ‘White civilization’ to that of ‘Western civilization’, which occurred in Europe and North America in the early to mid twentieth century, was propelled by the failure and incoherence of the race concept.53 Even intellectuals associated with Nazi ideology were not convinced. Spengler was condescending about racial science: as soon ‘as light is let through it, “race” vanishes suddenly and completely’.54 After the Second World War, the notion that ‘the word race should be banished’ – popularized in We Europeans, first published in 1935 – was given impetus by the association of the idea of race with Nazism and genocide.55 In a series of UNESCO statements and reports ‘the race concept’ was branded a dangerous fallacy.56
Any definition of racism that ties it to a belief in ‘the race concept’ is likely to conclude that racism is a doctrine from a discredited past and, by extension, a residual rather than a living force. It is worthwhile recalling that the term ‘racism’ was a creation of anti-racists. From its first use it has been a tool employed by those seeking to oppose it.57 The nature and meaning of that ‘it’ has changed as anti-racists have come to recognize the changing ways in which people are ‘othered’ and excluded. This helps explain why ‘racism’ is a vital part of today’s critical vocabulary. It no longer reflects a narrow belief in ‘race ideology’ but is routinely associated with racial and ethnic inequality and stereotyping. This conceptual expansion is widespread and appears unstoppable, but its international implications have not been given sufficient attention. For example, the ‘racism is prejudice plus power’ equation, sometimes credited to the American pastor Joseph Barndt, and which became widespread in the USA in the 1970s, is still assumed to convey the message that racism is a White problem because it is they who have power.58 Yet once prejudice and power are found elsewhere, ‘racism is prejudice plus power’ smuggles through a conceptually and geographically expanded notion of racism. Something similar can be said of other innovative categories, such as ‘new racism’, ‘cultural racism’, ‘coded racism’, and ‘racism without racists’. Noting that it is ‘a myth about the past that racism has generally been of the superiority/inferiority kind’, Barker’s ‘new racism’ framed racism as a pattern of exclusionary cultural preferences and nativist sentiment.59 Balibar also wrote about a ‘racism without races’, ‘whose dominant theme is not biologic heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences’ and ‘the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions’.60 Cohen argued that understanding how racism both works against and connects Irish, Jewish, and Black people in Britain meant understanding Britain as ‘multi-racist’.61
None of these authors give consideration to an important consequence of expanding and pluralizing racism: namely that its global geography changes. Another consequence is that the borderline between ethnic discrimination and racism becomes even more unclear. As Anthias notes, when ‘practices of exclusion, that are the hallmark of all ethnic phenomena, are accompanied by discourses and practices of inferiorisation against any ethnically constituted difference, then we can talk about racism’. She expands this point by concluding that ‘Racist discourse involves the use of ethnic categorisations (which might be constructed around cultural, linguistic or territorial boundaries as well as supposed biological ones) as signifiers of an immutable and deterministic difference.’62 So why does ethnicity continue to be relegated to an ‘also ran’ in debates on racism? There are many reasons but one is the continued influence of the traditional sociological distinction between race and ethnicity, which casts the latter as about culture and the former as about blood descent. Hence, ethnicity is said to be chosen whilst race is not. ‘Membership of an ethnic group’, Banton tells us, ‘is usually voluntary; membership in a racial group is not.’63 Morning provides a useful summary of this thesis: ‘individuals can choose the ethnic group(s) with which they most identify, and signal their affiliation with the group(s) by means of superficial behavior (e.g. choice of clothing or food)’, but race is ‘involuntary – it is imposed by others – and immutable’.64 There are three main problems with this distinction. First, casting race as ‘immutable’ and, hence, beyond
